


Ahch-To Chronicles

by bam_cassiopeia



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Ambiguity, Ben Solo Deserved Better, Cameo City - Freeform, Canon Compliant, Catharsis, Comedy, Comedy of Errors, Crack, Don't copy to another site, Dumbass Alert, Epilogue, F/M, Fuck-It Fic, Gen, May Contain Some Serious Themes, Podfic Available, Post-Canon, Post-Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Fix-It, The Force, it would be angst if it wasn't crack, kind of??
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-19
Updated: 2020-02-19
Packaged: 2021-02-28 02:47:12
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,250
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22806565
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bam_cassiopeia/pseuds/bam_cassiopeia
Summary: The Force doesn’t bring you back from the dead without a purpose.Too bad Ben Solo is done with the Force, purpose, destiny, and just about everything, because you don't get more stubborn than a Skywalker.Rey may have her own plans, but Ben's too busy conjugating her in the conditional to see the hints.
Relationships: Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren, The Force & Ben Solo
Comments: 29
Kudos: 104
Collections: TROS Reylo Fix-it Fics





	Ahch-To Chronicles

**Author's Note:**

> [Podfic version](https://podtail.com/en/podcast/the-reading-reylos/-the-ahch-to-chronicles-by-bam-cassiopeia-10/), read by [Lissanae ](https://twitter.com/Lissanae1)  
> 

The first breath he takes after dying is water, which is somewhere between disorienting, panic-inducing, and typical of Ben's luck.

It’s pure instinct that guides him up, up, up, towards light and _air_ and -

And a weird opening that makes him think, mortifyingly, of a vagina. As far as symbolism goes, it's kind of on the nose, but it doesn't really make for a rebirth scene out of a classical epic.

Breathing air is amazing though. At least until he remembers, and then everything is a little less amazing.

It’s Ahch-To, where no one will stop by happenstance. No ship. No means of communication outside of the frayed remnants of a Force bond he doesn’t want to use.

He’s stuck.

Death would have been less cruel, but then, when has the Force dealt anything else? Smoke and mirrors and cosmic games.

There is a lot of screaming, on the first day, and once he finds the stupid temple with its mosaic, one less place of Jedi worship in the galaxy. It doesn’t make him feel better, but it makes it clear that if the Force can make scars disappear it can’t do much for anger issues.

He walls off what remains of his bond with Rey on the second day, afraid he’ll open it by mistake otherwise. She’s better off without him.

 _He_ ’s better off without her.

There’s not much for him to do, which is rather disappointing. Fishing and gathering and maintaining the handful of tools left by his uncle in the half-dozen stone huts seem to be about it.

If the Force expects him to meditate or reflect like some Jedi in self-imposed exile, then it can wait until the nine hells of Corellia warm over. The one thing he’s learned is there’s no balance when the Force's natural state is never-ending conflict. The light is just as selfish as the dark, and he's done with both.

Enlightenment, Ben finds, is overrated, and he still needs something to fill his days.

He starts by talking to the Caretakers, because social interaction is part of most species’ needs and he needs to talk to _someone_ or risk a descent towards madness. If he's going to be here until he dies, he'd rather have decent relationships with his neighbors.

There's a bit of a lecture, since he wrought great destruction on the ancient temple of the Jedi, but once he apologizes one of the Lanais points out at least he did it without starting a fire hazard, _and_ with an apology, which is apparently a big deal.

He doesn’t tell them his apology isn’t worth much because he’s just being polite and has no regrets, and he’s forgiven on the condition that he doesn’t destroy anything else, which is an easy promise to make.

Mainly because the only Jedi structures left on the island are their huts, and he likes having a roof, even if it’s a leaky one.

The Lanais seem surprised when he keeps going out of his way to socialize after that, and somewhat wary, but he realizes soon enough it’s because his uncle didn’t, and from the Caretakers’ tales neither did the Jedi of old.

Ben thinks that says a lot about them, and that’s how he offers to help with the everyday chores on the island. Not that it’s a selfless move, considering his dire need for occupation.

The Lanais think him hilarious for the offer, because their society is strictly gendered, and as a male, he should be offering to accompany the Visitors on one of their fishing expeditions.

Which he does.

It turns out he doesn’t have sea legs and probably never will, which kind of sucks considering Ahch-To is ninety percent water, and the Lanais decide to exempt him from gendered expectations because they’re not stupid enough to turn away free labour or someone who can reach the highest of shelves without ever needing a stool to climb on.

He likes the Lanais, but the best thing he has to say about the porgs is they provide a change of diet that requires next to no real effort. They taste remarkably like chicken, which is not particularly surprising: a lot of things taste remarkably like chicken across the galaxy, including some that were never alive in the first place.

“Ben,” his dead uncle says, fuzzy and blueish and frowning at Ben’s third barbecue attempt like it’s some kind of crime.

“I have nothing to say to you,” Ben says.

“I, on the other hand, believe we have much to talk about.”

“No. Maybe we had, but that window closed. Go bugger your chosen heir if you need something.”

“Is that jealousy I hear?”

“How surprisingly unJedi of me,” Ben deadpans. “Although truth be told I’d rather grow old and die here than take up another legacy or be a pawn again.”

The ghost chuckles. “Ah, a dramatic vow, how familiar.”

“Not really. I’m not going to spend my life being miserable, waiting for some naive kid with the Force to hand my fuck-ups to.”

Luke only seems amused by the thinly-veiled accusation. “What will you do, then?”

That one’s easy. “Tomorrow I’m helping the Caretakers build a new house. I want to learn how they do it because it rains in the huts of the wise Jedi, who apparently never bothered to ask their neighbors about insulation, and I don’t see why I should condemn myself to perpetual humidity. I think there’s storytelling in the evening, or maybe they just meant we’d be eating fish.”

“Lofty goals,” Luke says. “When you could so much good out in the galaxy. Rey’s going to need help, you know, if she’s to make the Jedi Order a reality again.”

 _Low blow_ , Ben almost replies, but then what else should he expect? “Insulating my current home seems more feasible. I think I want to make paper and ink too; I’ve been thinking about taking up calligraphy again, but obviously that’s not quite possible. It’s too bad I didn’t read up more on low-tech production techniques when I could have, but I guess I could make a hobby out of experimenting. I don’t suppose you have any pointers?”

Luke doesn’t, but he has a lot of arguments that Ben ignores, because he’s busy thinking that of course, _of fucking course_ the Force has something for him in mind; of course, it didn’t bring him back just to make him suffer, that’s just part of the fallout of being one of its favored pawns.

If he wasn’t done with hubris, he’d be tempted to do something stupid, like find the source of the Force and wreck it; it’s probably some meddling old man who lives in some kind of pyramid and pontificates at the drop of his ridiculous hat.

Of course, it’s now that he doesn’t want them that the ghosts start turning up in earnest. Figures.

“Mistakes you made, hmmm? Learn, you still can.”

“You’re one to talk,” Ben says. “It didn’t take me two decades in a swamp to realize I’d fucked up, and I don’t know that you can claim _groomed by Darth Sidious since childhood_ as a defense.”

“Excuses for yourself, you need?”

“No. I just don’t like random ghosts lecturing me. I don’t even _know_ you outside of Luke’s stories. And if you still haven’t figured out you need to stop meddling and let us fail and learn on our own, then _you_ didn’t learn much.”

The ghost’s gimmer stick actually hits Ben’s shin, which is deeply unfair. _He_ can’t touch the damned apparitions.

“Like physical violence is going to change my mind,” he grumbles.

“A way for you, there is,” the ghost barrels on. “Return, the Jedi must.”

“That’s really not my problem,” Ben shrugs. “My problem is the correct consistency of paper paste. I think my first batch was too liquid, but it’s too early to tell.”

“From your responsibilities, you want to hide? Atonement, you do not wish to seek?”

“No,” he says. “My schedule is full for at least the next three decades.”

Yoda’s ghost disappears with an extremely rude comment about self-centered Skywalkers punctuated by another whack with his stick; Ben really should have believed his uncle’s tales of his master's overall dickishness.

Third time’s not the charm, because as far as timing goes it could hardly be worse, since Ben is jerking off. He has several years of that to catch up on, and he’s condemned to celibacy unless he starts looking at Lanais, so he doesn’t feel particularly bad when he thinks about Rey’s tits and what he could have done to them and what could have followed if the Force hadn’t screwed them over.

If he’d been less of an idiot, he’d have stopped that stupid elevator and kissed her and more if affinities - the Force would _still_ have screwed them over, but at least they’d have screwed, period, and he’d know exactly what kind of things she’d want him to do with her tits, and he can’t think about _that_ with some random ghost watching.

“Seriously?” he asks the ghost and its stupid white hairs and its dumb look of surprise. “ _Now_?”

“I’ll be back later,” the ghost says, fading away.

“Don’t bother,” Ben calls back, but the old geezer’s already gone, and he’s talking to the crappy wall of his crappy hut.

“You’re Obi-Wan Kenobi,” he tells the ghost when he returns. This one stares at Ben with something like regret instead of talking, and it’s a little freaky.

The ghost nods, outline going fuzzy with the gesture. The Force can’t even afford decent special effects.

“Lay it on me,” he sighs.

“I failed your grandfather,” Kenobi says, which is actually surprising.

“Hum,” Ben says, because _what_.

“It may have saved the galaxy, in the end. Failure is nothing to fear.”

For an instant Ben wonders if the Jedi Order had something against the rhetorical arts, because from what he’s seen of its members, when they’re not making their points in the most roundabout way, they’re straight up insulting.

“We’re down to pithy advice now?”

“I fear so,” the ghost chuckles, and fuzzies out of existence.

None of them will ever let Ben have the last word, he realizes. It’s a sad thought.

His grandfather remains conspicuously absent, and Ben decides that’s just as well. Just to be sure he climbs to the temple he’s ruined, and tells the Force in very specific terms that some lines are not to be crossed, unless the point is to make him fall again.

Grandfather doesn’t come; in fact, the ghosts stop coming at all for a time.

Temptation comes instead. She doesn’t have the buns anymore, and her lightsaber is new. He still wants to give her everything, but now he’s got enough sense to be terrified by that instinct.

It hurts to see Rey, because it’s probably the Force that maneuvered her so she’d find him, and because when he tells her he doesn’t intend to leave, she doesn’t understand at all.

They may have a row. He may imply her decision to follow the Jedi path is ill-advised, in regrettably strong terms. She may call him a coward and imply Kylo Ren at least could have satisfied her, at which point he may, after pointing out that last point was unrelated to the quarrel at hand and patently false anyway because Kylo Ren hadn’t ever dared to think of her without clothes on and didn’t even jerk off, tell her to get the fuck out of his island.

She does, fuming enough to shake, and because he doesn’t have many occasions to be dramatic and probably canceled all future ones, he screams at her departing ship to never come back.

On the whole, he’s had better days, some of them as Kylo Ren.

“That wasn’t very nice,” his uncle says.

“Cry me a river and drown in it,” Ben grumbles, and the ghost sighs before disappearing.

He’d hoped to be altogether done with the ghosts, but that was apparently asking too much.

Rey doesn’t come back, and if she tries the bond he doesn't feel it, but she sends Chewbacca and Lando Calrissian, which is a cheap, cheap move, which is exactly what Ben tells them, which is clearly not the apology they were expecting first thing.

“No,” he tells them, once the part with the yelling and the crying and the cathartic flow of emotions is over and it becomes clear they are not here _just_ to see him. “I’m staying here.”

Chewbacca calls him an idiot, and Calrissian shakes his head in a disappointed gesture he probably stole from Ben’s own parents. “He’s right, kid,” he says.

“A very common delusion,” Ben replies.

He’s more than a bit baffled when he sees them, but Rey sends her friends next. He tortured one, maimed the second, and didn’t even know there was a third. Too bad, because he actually likes Rose Tico - she doesn’t try to convince him to leave. She just glares.

“We welcomed Finn and every ex-trooper we found in the ranks of the Resistance,” says Poe ‘I’m a pilot’ Dameron. “That could be you.” His face makes a liar out of him, but it’s a good try for someone who has torture to hold against Ben.

“We’re all Force sensitives,” said ex-trooper adds, eyes shining with excitement. “We have so much to learn, and the First Order is still out there.”

Rose Tico glares. _You son of a bantha_ , her eyes say. _Get your shit together, because for some unfathomable reason Rey thinks she needs you_.

He may be imagining the last part.

“I could have guessed,” Ben replies, with considerably less enthusiasm. “I don’t really want to join a paramilitary organization to train its Force-users unit though, especially if it’s to sic them on what we all know to be a lot of kidnapped, brainwashed children.”

The following silence is slightly uncomfortable, and maybe it’s petty, but Ben savors the stricken look on the ex-trooper’s face. FN-Something. Finn.

“That’s not fair,” Tico says, mouth pinched.

Ben shrugs. “It is from where I stand.”

There may be a bit of a scuffle and some name-calling at that point, but it was bound to happen so that’s alright. It’s somewhat less awkward than pretending friendliness. He’s relatively certain it’s a human bonding process too, although it might be a teenagers-only thing; that part he’s not so sure about.

In the end, they decide Ben’s still a dick and he tells them it checks out, because it never was a Kylo Ren thing, and it’s really not his fault if they assumed it was. They’re probably not wrong, but he doesn’t think very highly of two-thirds of them, so there’s that. The jury is still out on Tico, because she punched him in the face, and it’s not that he _likes_ being punched in the face per se, but it’s pretty much how all his meaningful-if-sometimes-abusive non-familial relationships started, so maybe his bleeding nose is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Odds are it’s not, though.

“Are you going to keep pushing everyone away?” his mother asks, and that’s one ghost he’d hoped to escape nearly as much as his grandfather’s. At least it proves the Force’s VIP ghostly afterlife isn’t restricted to old men, he supposes.

“I’m on excellent terms with my neighbors,” Ben points out. “Maybe because the most they demand of me is common decency. Training Force users for the Resistance? That’s a bit much to ask.”

She raises an eyebrow, perfectly blue and fuzzy and dubious. “Is it?”

“Yes,” Ben nods. “I’ve sacrificed enough of my life to grand causes to know I’m not touching that one with a pole ten miles long. Your three heroic nitwits didn’t even mention your precious Republic once; all they want is to finish the Order, and then what? I know you’ve always conveniently forgotten such details, but the Resistance is nowhere close to being a legitimate governing body, forget an actually democratic one. I’m not giving _your_ bunch of fanatics trained troops of pseudo-Jedi; I’ve done my part to bring chaos to the galaxy already.”

“Maybe you should be telling that to the living.” It almost sounds reasonable, but then his mother always had a knack for that.

“They can read a history book,” he tells her. “It’ll tell them the same thing, and it’ll save me a trip to the gallows, because you’d have to be dead to think anyone is going to listen to the ex-Supreme Leader of the First Order’s lectures on politics or the separation of church and state or what the fuck ever. I’m not dying _again_ because _even dead_ you and Luke can’t do people the courtesy not to try and saddle them up with whatever destiny you decided is theirs.”

“Is that what we’re doing?” she asks, that hint of _I’m the only reasonable adult here_ still in her voice, and he really, really wishes he had an off button for the ghosts.

“What’s Rey busy with these days?”

“Not what you think she is,” his mother says. It’s not much of an answer, but it’s the last words she gifts him with.

Chewbacca comes back alone with the pretext that Ahch-To is the only place he can indulge in roasted porg, although once he’s approved Ben’s, he spends most of the evening vaunting Rey’s cooking. Ben doesn’t tell him he knows it’s all lies, partly because he doubts Rey’s shared the detail of their Force bond with anyone so he’s not about to start, and partly because he knows cooking is an integral part of Wookiee courtship, and he’s trying very hard not to draw any conclusions and it takes about all his concentration anyway.

And then of all people it’s Commander Larma D’Acy, whom he barely remembers but apparently really needs to talk to Ben about his mother’s legacy and the future of the Resistance. It’s a bit bewildering in itself, but the weirdest part is that she takes notes instead of declaring him an irrecuperable cause when he calls the Resistance a disaster of public relationships and gives him a shaky hug before declaring she could really use him back on base.

“What the fuck,” he asks his mother’s ghost as soon as it appears, because she’s smiling smugly, and she’s one with the Force, so she has to know what’s going on. He may be getting a little frazzled by the succession of visitors, truth be told. He's lucky the Lanais don't mind; they look at every visitor like they might blow up something if left without surveillance for more than a minute, but they consider that entertainment. He's pretty sure the Caretakers have a competition of who can look the most intimidatingly judgemental.

“Looks like someone really doesn’t want you to stay here,” his mother says, and winks.

“The Force can shove it,” Ben snarls, and stomps to what he still calls the Vagina Cave in his head - partly because he’s too embarrassed to ask the Caretakers what its actual name is, and partly because the Jedi would probably have hated that.

There’s nothing for him to see in there, but the ghosts never appear inside, and it's empty and private, which means he can allow himself half an hour of fury against the powers that be and their insistence he make soldiers rather than fucking paper.

He'd rather not scare the Lanais when he needs the occasional rage-off.

After D’Acy it gets truly weird, because the next visitors are complete strangers and accessorily, members of the Central Isopter, an obscure death-worshipping cult he’d thought extinct. Their matriarch sent them so they can ask questions of a man who was once dead on the advice of a Force oracle, they say, which Ben thinks raises more questions than it answers, but he’s not sure he wants those answers, so he doesn't ask.

It probably boils down to the Force meddling anyway.

“That oracle swindled your matriarch, because I don’t remember anything,” Ben tells them, and: “Well, nothing but pain and _oh shit I’m dying_ , but that’s it.”

They seem delighted enough by that, which Ben tries not to think of as seriously fucking weird, but still a bit expectant, so he shows them the Vagina Cave. “That’s where I was reborn,” he indicates, and there is a rather long bit of contemplative staring from the cultists that may be one of the funniest moments of his life.

The cultists are the first, but they’re not the last. An elder of the Ninn Orthodoxy shows up; he stays three days and asks a lot of questions about the nature of the Force to which Ben has no answers, and some more practical questions about training Force users, and whether Master Solo would consider taking on some students.

Ben is no master, and he doesn’t take students, but the elder’s been nothing but polite, including bringing host gifts to the Lanais, so Ben chomps down on his irritation and gives the man a list of things not to do and some basic control exercises.

After that it’s D’Acy again, with people Ben doesn’t know, followed by two members of a sect with an unpronounceable name, and by the time Hux turns up Ben is starting to think the Force plans on sending everyone in the galaxy with an offer to leave or another.

Without his hair gelled in place his old rival looks nearly human. Ben knows better, though.

“Cockroach,” he says.

“Sithspawn,” Hux replies, and they both nod, their hate of each other reaffirmed, the natural order of the universe acknowledged.

“How did you even know where to find me?”

“I have my ways,” Hux shrugs. “I’m with the Resistance now.”

“Fun times I imagine.”

“No. Proof being I’m supposed to _reconnect_ and ask you to join us, because _some idiot_ thinks a reformed Supreme Leader would be the best way to show we’re not about to execute every ex-First Order member.”

“Maybe just make flyers,” Ben suggests, and Hux actually laughs. It sounds like a bark but it’s a laugh, Ben’s sure of that. “Want to get drunk? I have a bottle of shitty Corellian whiskey left from the last time Chewie visited.”

They do get drunk, and there isn’t even one murder attempt, which must mean they’ve both grown a little.

Rey does come back. By then Ben has a visitor every few days; only two tried to kill him, and despite his best efforts most of them call him Master.

“I can’t keep waiting for you,” she says.”I really can’t.”

“I don’t want you to,” Ben replies. It may be the biggest lie he’s ever told, and he doesn’t think she buys it, because he may be redeemed or something, but selfless he is not. “You need to let me go,” he adds.

“Don’t be dramatic,” she says, which isn’t part of the dramatic breakup script he thought they were going for. “I mean I’m done trying to find ways to convince you to leave this stupid island, so I’m staying for now. You're lucky it's not a desert, because I don't know if I love you that much." And then she throws her bag at him and demands to know which hut is theirs, because she’s tired of nagging ghosts and she needs a nap.

By which she means sex.

A lot of sex.

It may take him a bit of time to recover, because finding out exactly what she wants him to do to her tits and more if affinities on top of the realization that _she’s_ behind the procession of visitors has his brain scrambled for days.

He may tell her he loves her as soon as he does recover, and she may call him by a few creative names. They may be, as the Lanais will declare down the line, annoyingly precious.

(He figures out paper on the fifth year. He has a steady supply of it already, but it’s not really the same, although it’s nice of Rey’s friends to make sure they don’t lack in anything. They may be his friends too now; it’s been a full year since the last fistfight, and _that_ was about who got the last portion of Chewie’s porg special.

There’s the Caretakers’ trading post too; the visits haven’t stopped, although by now no one asks Ben to leave Ahch-To, and hopeful students come to Rey rather than him. Most of them just want to learn enough control to get on with their lives; the handful that are serious about the Force either belong to one sect or another, or they’ve led the kind of lives that mean they’ll never leave Ahch-To for long again.

“What are you going to do with it?” Rey asks, creamy sheets of thick paper in her hands, almost caressing. It's a bit distracting.

"I thought you could use it," he says. "For that manual you keep saying you're going to write."

A datapad would be simpler, but it's the symbolism of the thing. He made the canvas, and she'll fill it. Destiny, or something like that.

"That manual _we're_ going to write," she corrects. "Your name's going on it, whether you want it or not."

"I hate you," he grumbles, because he knows she will.

"I know," she says, and maybe she laughs or maybe he does.

They may, despite everything, or because of it, be happy.)

**Author's Note:**

> I came out of TROS like “I’m never writing anything for this film” and it took less than a month and a ridiculous longfic wip to turn that into “I’m never writing canon-verse for this film” and two months and one insistent crack idea to upgrade to “I’m never writing serious canon-verse for this film.” It’s anyone’s guess how long that’ll last.  
> I gave myself two days to get it done, and I just met the deadline. Unbetaed and all that. At some point I may check tenses.  
> Anyway I still [tumble into the void](https://and-then-bam-cassiopeia.tumblr.com/) and I do [ the tweety thing](https://twitter.com/bam_cassiopeia/) here and there.


End file.
